Vehicular accidents are a common occurrence in many parts of the world and, unfortunately, vehicular accidents, even at low impact and separation velocities, are often accompanied by injury to vehicle occupants. It is often desirable to reconcile actual occupant injury reports to a potential for energy based on vehicular accident information. Trained engineers and accident reconstruction experts evaluate subject vehicles involved in a collision, and based on their training and experience, may be able to arrive at an estimated change in velocity for each the subject vehicles. The potential for injury can be derived from knowledge of the respective change in velocity for the subject vehicles.
However, involving trained engineers and accident reconstruction experts in all collisions, especially in the numerous low velocity collisions, is often not cost effective. Other techniques also have concerns. For example, energy-based methods commonly employed to assess collision severity require an estimate of the deformation to both vehicles involved in the collision. For some insurance carriers, it is not part of their standard claims process to collect post-accident photographs for a third party vehicle. For these carriers, the information about the physical damage to the third party vehicle may be limited to what can be inferred from a police report or a repair estimate, which can prevent use of certain techniques.